


The Hanged Man (XII)

by winebearcat



Series: The World (XXI) [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Bisexuality, Canon Divergence, Dragon Age II Spoilers, Drug Use, Eventual Smut, F/F, F/M, Female Homosexuality, M/M, Mage Rights, Mental Health Issues, NSFW, Primarily M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-09-14
Packaged: 2018-04-06 17:51:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4231167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winebearcat/pseuds/winebearcat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Garrett Hawke, a sharp-tongued, unapologetically handsome, and powerful apostate, enters Kirkwall City in the wake of the Blight and his brother’s death. Burdened by grief yet fueled by a burning obligation to protect his remaining family, he blazes through any and all opposition with a deflecting sense of slow drip black humor and a well-worn staff. Conversely, the haunted, recalcitrant, and driven Anders, formerly of Ferelden’s Circle of Magi and currently Darktown’s beloved healer, conducts himself in a hermetic manner until he is dragged, headlong, into Garrett Hawke’s world. Both men are flecked with scars, both tangible and intangible, that will concurrently deepen and heal as they begin an ensuing rapport rife with lust, disdain, friendship, anger, and eventually, love.  </p><p>Ilyahna writes as Anders and winebearcat as Hawke.</p><p>This story is canon divergent in places, and does not re-tell events from the game. Content is largely original.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue I: It Just Means Someone Is From the Anderfels

**Author's Note:**

> The Hanged Man (XII) is the Major Arcana card in a traditional Tarot deck that represents ultimate surrender, martyrdom, and irreversible sacrifice for a greater purpose. This is the archetype to meditate upon to help break old patterns of behavior and habits that restrict oneself.
> 
> Unfettered, heartfelt shoutout to the amazing, talented, and special Nenn for signing on as the resident artist for this project and especially for jump-starting us out of our perpetual plotting murk. Check her out on DeviantArt (username: thereXandXbackXagain).

                                                                                                                   

He doesn't remember much about his childhood. Those things that adhere to his consciousness, or even surface in dreams, are nearly invariably attached to some significant event, with few of them positive.

He is two years old when he has an awful encounter with a chicken which has taken a permanent disliking to him. It is a rooster, and he is a small boy, with delicate bones that his father bemoans will surely never produce the bulk and muscle of a farmer. The winged beast is almost as large as he is himself, and whenever he wanders outside, the creature will seek him out, attracted with a malicious predatory instinct to his bright head of overlong, gleaming golden hair. It descends upon him one day upon stepping out the front door of their modest cottage, and he remembers screaming in fear and pain, for in his young mind, it may well be a wyvern, raking with claws and piercing with beak. His mother is half swatting, half pulling it away from him, adding to his terror by bellowing for his father.

 _“I have had enough of this, Rivalt!”_ she is yelling, and it is that tone, that instant that embodies the way his father's name sounds upon the lips, for in all his years hence, he has never uttered it aloud to himself, or to anyone else.

 _“It is a prize cock,”_ his father responds, and then there is an argument about _“caring more for his cock than his son,”_ which he is too hysterical and too young to absorb, and then after much hollering, squawking, and tears, there is produced a cleaver. His father snatches the bird, presses it into the dust, and with a glint of sunlight on metal, the head of the bird is stricken from its body.

And then it stands up, and runs. It is the most horrible sight of his young life, and was thereafter forever a memory both grotesque and tainted with macabre humor. His brothers found it hilarious, and chased it with bets of who would catch it first.

He did not remember how this farcical theater came to an end, except that his father grumbled about dinner that night, and that he had nightmares about headless birds for years.

-ooo- 

He is six years old when his mother gives him an embroidered pillow for his name-day, for a celebration of a thing, and identity, that by now he has all but forgotten, hidden away in the deep roads of his soul. The pillow is a splendid thing, just perfect for the size of his tawny child's head. She has found some material for it that is almost shiny, a greenish gold, and stuffed it liberally with sheep's wool until it is so thick it must burst. It is festooned with saffron dyed tassels on the four corners, and the edges are corded sturdily in the same color. Upon the face of the pillow, she has created such wondrous things with needle and thread. There is a boy at play with a sword in a field of gold grass, wearing golden armor, and flying above him is a dragon, wings spread in fierce majesty. He knows the boy is him, and that that he will slay the dragon and that he will be a hero. This same night his mother reads to him, as she always does to her boys, even though he is the only one that stays awake through the entirety of each story. Before he falls asleep, his mother whispers to him that this pillow is his dream-catcher, and to keep it with him always, for it will ensure that all his wishes come true.  

 _“Will I really slay dragons, mother?”_ he yawns, fingers tracing the wings of the great beast as his child's imagination brings the image to life in his mind.

She strokes his long hair, tucking it behind an ear. _“Dragons will learn to fear you, my love,”_ she promises.

It is a tall promise for the mere middle son of a farmer, one who is tall for his age, but still lanky, with delicate wrists and fine boned fingers like his mother's. He recalls falling asleep, imagining himself wielding a sword to strike down a dragon, and thinks it is funny. A secret joke between them.

-ooo-

He is twelve years old when he burns down the barn. He recalls the righteous anger that preceded the unexpected event quite well – better, perhaps, than many other things from his youth.

He has, until now, dutifully performed as expected as the son of a farmer. He rises at dawn, always groggy for he lays awake and wanders through the stars, or dreams fitfully of a strange place where things are not always as they seem. He goes into the fields with his two brothers, pulls weeds, picks corn, rids leaves of inch-worms (though he can never bring himself to smash them like his brothers, so he pockets them and feeds them to the baby birds in the nest upon the back eave). He digs in the dirt with a hoe, plants seeds, shucks manure from the stables, and learns to take care of their two, plodding draft horses.

It is a summer afternoon, and he is in the barn, using a pitchfork to turn hay so that it does not molder, when his father comes in with a familiar object in his hand. It is a small cage of twigs wrapped with twine, a thing made with care within which the young boy has housed a small creature. It is a rat – a runtish, weak thing with milky eyes that branded it blind, and he had found it one day cowering in a corner of the stables, lucky thus far not to have been pounced upon by one of the numerous farm-yard cats. Feeling sorry for it, he had constructed a safe haven for it, and thereafter hid it beneath a thin, discarded cloth behind his cot. He saves it scraps of produce, and has named it Charger, like the great horses of knights in his mother's bedtime tale, and it had been his companion for almost a year now. He speaks to it at night, in his thoughts, for his brothers do not engage him in conversation other than to laugh at him or tease him for his weakness of body and soul.

He recalls the fear he had felt when his father had produced that cage. He shoves it abruptly into the air between them, almost triumphantly, as though he has suddenly lit upon the reason for his son's failure to measure up. The small rat bounces roughly about in the makeshift dwelling, particles of lettuce and grain scattering through the bars. It scrabbles with tiny claws for purchase in its violently shifting dwelling.

 _“You're worse than a damn girl! Your mother has made you soft, boy!”_ His father's face is red, and only later would he liken that rosacea to over consumption of cheap gin. He is regaling his father, words stumbling over words, protesting that it is just a pet, and it is harmless, but his father is not listening. Two large, meaty hands take the delicate cage and crack it apart like the fragile shell of an egg, and then Charger, his defenseless, blind rat, is in one of those hands, and his father squeezes.

 _“I'll not have you soft, boy! Nor wasting your time on woman's work!”_ How caring for a blind rat was woman's work, to this day he did not know, but the rat's neck snaps easily, for apparently that is man's work, and he screams in protest. At first it is a cry of sorrow and shock, standing there with his thin shoulders, his unkempt blonde hair, and a pitchfork that is twice his narrow size.

Then it is a cry of rage as his father flings the rat's carcass to the ground and bellows to him to get to work!

That is when the flames come.

He recalls that they began as fury in his chest, a white hot burning rage that spread out through his veins like hot lead being poured into a blacksmith's mold. Only the burning does not stop as it heaves to the surface of his skin, but it cascades through the tips of his fingers, seething from his pores. The handle of the pitchfork in his right hand begins to smoke, and blackens, but he does not notice. Smoke coils from the ground at his feet, spreading outward like a nighttime mist from a lake shore, but he does not notice. The air about him shimmers, like a summer mirage, and beyond it, his father's reddened face begins to blur, to waver, and what he does notice is that the expression upon that visage has changed. There is no longer indignation, wrath, spitefulness, but something different. Fear.

It is a dry summer, and the air is already hot, and the frenetic energy that pours from the young boy cannot merely dissipate into the air, and so it licks into the hay that he has been turning. It catches in a rush, and in mere seconds, flames are tearing through the dried beds in blazing reds and oranges, boiling up from a center of pure, vicious blue fed not only by oxygen, but by the rage of a twelve year old boy.

It is only barely that he escapes with his own life, still not understanding what he has done. His father does not wait to help him, does not call to him, but turns and runs, leaving the destroyed cage and the boy's decimated pet where they lay. In mere moments, the entirety of the barn is ablaze, black smoke boiling furiously into the summer sky.

It is only two days later when the Templars come.

-ooo-

The Templars do not care to be gentle. Perhaps they could have been, but Anders fought them even then. He did not want to hurt anyone; it was not his nature, not until much later, when his conscience battled wars of submergence and sometimes lost. It is the beginning of an inner torment that defines the character of the man he will be.

He is still abed when they arrive, and he does not know who or what they are, only that they loom above the wooden frame of his bed, two of them, and gather shadows in their crevices and curves like ominous statues.

It is always how he will picture Templars. Like crows on the branch of some dying tree.

They bear their armor, and weapons, and it is belatedly that he realizes that he is not dreaming, and the voices that are muttering in response to shrill objections which in a familiar feminine tone finally place the scene in reality. His mother does not haunt his dreams.

It is at this moment that one of the Templars reaches for him, and a mailed hand closes over a skinny arm. He is terrified, without truly understanding what is happening to him, and so the part of his mind that dreams reacts with instinct. A small boy becomes a horrified tempest, and he has time to feel the hair all along his body stand on end, and cries out because the hand that grips him turns to flame that would leave the mark of fingers plastered to his skin. It is because of the energy he generates, super-heating the metal, before the careless Templar recalls his business with a curse not fit for such young ears.

The way the air becomes thick when a Templar is negating magic is something Anders recalls well, though he feels it so often in his lifetime he will never be sure if this moment is when he truly first appreciated the stomach-lurching nuance of it. He is suddenly only a young child once more, rather than a creature that burns down barns, and the Templar is none too patient with his protests or his cries of pain, for the armored hand has seared his tender flesh. He is dragged from bed, and then his mother is immixed within the tiny maelstrom of his chaotically shifting life, yelling about clothes.

The importance of clothing at the moment, beyond the short breeches that he wears to bed, does not register, even as his mother is slapping away the Templar's hand from his arm, tears streaming down her face at the burn even as the man is saying it will be _“taken care of.”_ She is pulling a shirt on over his head, and pulling boots onto his feet in such a way that she is unbalancing him. As she is tying the laces of one, her trembling fingers break the leather, and she is crying harder when she takes a strip of her own skirt and winds it around the top of his boot to keep it on. It will not be the first time Anders has to keep his shoes on this way.

She tries to shove some items in a bag for him: a blanket, a carved wooden toy that is the only one he possesses, but the Templar in his emblazoned armor tugs the bag out of her hand, saying _“no personal items!”_ The words fall upon Anders' ears as both a hex and a challenge, and the embroidered pillow his mother made him six years before is wrapped in his arms and he isn't letting go, even when the second Templar sighs and reaches down to pull it away from him. That is when his mother, all five and a half feet of her, rises from her crouch beside her son and slaps the man with enough force that Anders remembers the way his jaw clacked when his head snapped sideways.

That was the way he was able to take his pillow. The way he was able to have one thing to remind him that he was someone outside the Circle.

-ooo-

Kinloch Hold.

That is where they take him. He is shuffled about between groups of Templars, clutching his one possession like a shield, and they exchange words about him. He's a lively one, that. Watch yourself that you don't take your eyes off him. Skinny bastard has already gotten away twice.

He is relayed through the desolate southern Anderfels, and ends up in manacles during the day, and bound with rope at night even with a guard set to watch him. By the end of the first two days he is lost, but would have run anyway – just picked a direction and gone. His mother had tried to comfort him as they dragged him out of the house, following him to the end of the dirt path to their house, assuring him that he was going away to be a great dragon-slayer, a mage that would change the world, but it took no great mind to realize that the men charged with his change in station have no love for him. He is constantly surrounded by that dampening field, which makes it hard to sleep, and when he can sleep, there are none of his usual vivid dreams. He feels like an animal going to slaughter.

The Circle Tower is no better than a cage. Again, someone tries to take away his pillow, but a woman with blonde hair calling herself Wynne distracts the Templar in charge of his intake by insinuating herself between them and flirting with the man. It is an exchange that Anders takes intense note of, for he is heretofore a student of the country art of persuasion: a fist to the face. He is fascinated with the lady's subtle manipulation that ends with her arm about his shoulders and the Templar laughing and pink faced as he has completely forgotten the dusty child with overlong blonde hair.

This lady is the first mage he meets. She tells him she studies the healing arts, and that she had a sense about him. He does not know what this means, or what sense anyone could have of him other than that he is dangerous and without worth. This is what the Templars have drilled into his mind for long weeks, and what lurks there in association with those frozen pictures of his father in the doorway of their home with his arms crossed, his face folded in darkly upon itself, and his brothers hurling rocks in his wake despite their mother between them.

He hears his name one more time; the name his mother gave him. It is when they label the phylactery of his stolen blood and read it aloud in ceremony. After this, the very word is tainted for him, as is the prison that surrounds him despite any attempts by other mages to be friendly. When others ask him his name, they are greeted with sour silence, and the few older mages, Wynne included, that might have heard it spoken have forgotten it, though he thinks Wynne only pretends to because she knows he is angry. It is not an unusual emotion in Kinloch Hold. Eventually, people stop asking, and just call him “Anders,” because his accent is distinctive enough, and he is of that pale gold palette that characterizes the northern peoples of the Anderfels. And he doesn't care, thinking that perhaps one day, even he will forget, for it becomes clearer each day he is behind the walls of the Circle that it doesn't matter who he is, nor who he was.  

-ooo-

His first escape attempt, six months after arriving, is a shabby effort; it is the sort concocted by a boy that still believes in brash acts of heroism, and involves a series of bed sheets tied together that break halfway down the wall. The debacle leaves him bruised and seeping blood from the unforgiving spines of a holly bush. He has no doubt the damned things are planted beneath the windows of the hold for just this reason. Nevertheless, the thirteen year old Anders soldiers on, and makes it over the outer wall and to the water, where he encounters the major flaw in his plan: it is a long way to the opposite shore. There is no question, however, that he would rather drown in the lake than go back to endless lessons on self control and hearing one more blasted thing about the dangers of blood magic. All he wants is to go home. He has not heard from his mother, for they do not allow letters from the outside , and he has barely learned enough of his own words to write his name.

They capture him before he has even managed to work himself into the water, while he's hesitating over the conundrum of his pillow getting wet in the lake. The man sneaks up on him, though truthfully it probably wasn't too hard of a thing to do. His subsequent arrest is more savage than it needs to be; a fierce, non-argumentative blow to the back of his head drops him like a stone, face down in the muddy shallows, and he finds himself back in the Tower an indeterminate amount of time later. Wynne is at his side, and he's dry, tucked in his cot, and has a bandage around his head. His hair is straggling and tangled about his shoulders, and her hand is smoothing his cheek.

 _“Do you fully understand Tranquility, Anders?”_ she asks.

He thinks he does, but is to find out that it is a rudimentary comprehension remedied that day by Wynne, though the effect she achieves with her efforts is perhaps not that which she intends. He listens dutifully as she describes the process, the reality of severing a mage's connection from the Fade, the life one can expect to lead, and goes so far as to relate to him her memories of the people he knows as Tranquil about the Circle. Of who they used to be, their dreams before the Templars burned them out from the inside.

Unbeknownst to her, Wynne's warning becomes a seed in Anders' young belly: a creeping vine of hatred and disgust that will eventually wind and fester through his whole being, squeezing his heart and stretching bitter-root tendrils into his mind. They will never make him Tranquil, he promises himself. He will not give them the chance.

Wynne's caution does have one advantageous ramification; Anders realizes he must apply himself more assiduously to his studies, so that when the time is right, he is prepared. The “sense” that the older mage professed to have about him turns out to be an affinity for the healing arts, a skill rare among mages, and in retrospect, Anders knows it is quite likely the reason he was tolerated beyond all his blatant rebellion.

He becomes Wynne's unofficial apprentice, and he is very good at what he does. Spirit healing comes naturally to him, and he thinks more than once that the talent manifested much earlier than did the destructive forces that saw him banished to Kinloch Hold. The rat his father had killed in his indignant rage at his weakling son had only been one of many such creatures he had nursed back to health. He is able to look back at his childhood and see the leg of a sheep that surely must have been broken in his hands, as he was simply trying to help the beast to rise from the bottom of the slope it had slipped down. He had been perhaps five years old then, and had never seen a broken limb; it simply looked oddly crooked. However, by the time he'd managed the animal to its feet, the leg was again straight. There had been a host of such creatures that he became conservator of over the course of his childhood, that quite surely should have died given what he came to know about injuries in the Circle, but that lived.

He learns all his lessons dutifully for just over two years after his first attempt at escape, by which time it seems even the Templars have mostly forgotten that he once tried to abscond, marking it down as normal behavior for a displaced and confused child. He catches remarks during this time from mages and Templars alike regarding his exemplary skill with the healing arts, and he mimics Wynne's behavior. She is calm, soft-spoken, and never short with a kind word. She is treated with reverence and respect, and allowed to move about the Tower with less restriction than many mages. Especially those that focus on more dangerous crafts.

Anders knows well enough that he can burn down barns and electrocute Templars, so he does not bother with these overt practices in his early years in the Circle. He does, however, apply himself to the invaluable mastery of the written word, so that he may read everything he is allowed to get his hands on (and much that he is, theoretically, not). His aptitude for reading go well indeed with shamelessly cultivated charm and deft sleight of hand, and so it is that he is able to secretly hone a similarly bewitching talent for misdirection, glamours, confusion, and putting a body to sleep or in a trance.

Thus it is that not long after his fifteenth name-day, an event so lacking in auspiciousness that not a soul is aware of it, including himself, for he is lost in a morass of violation of self, that Anders merely walks out the front gates of Kinloch Hold and finds himself for the second time abroad in Ferelden. This time, he is not a prisoner, but a fugitive.

He finds out several things on this second attempt. The first is that he has absolutely no skill at hunting or feeding himself other than to outright steal, which he does. He manages to charm an ale and a bowl of soup out of a man at an inn, which is subsequently where he is caught, all in a flurry of doors bursting open and armored Templars clattering in with weapons drawn. This is borne on the breeze of yet more knowledge: the utility of his phylactery. He had managed only two days and one chilly, hard night of freedom.

Anders learns from each mistake he makes over the years, and by the time he is seventeen, he's chalked up twenty days of freedom and a vast knowledge of local vegetation and herbal lore. He also learns to cover his tracks both naturally and arcanely, navigate by the stars, and memorizes maps of Ferelden and the surrounding provinces down to the smallest detail. They punish him every time, although because he remains “in Wynne's skirts” as the Templars were fond of saying, it's never more severe than vicious cycles of detestable cleaning duties. And the fools never once think to take away his books or ban him from the library.

-ooo-

The library is where he meets Anenna, the first girl he ever truly noticed as more than part of the landscape. She has dark skin and black hair and was unlike any of the other females. She spends hours teaching him how to draw glyphs that paralyzed, that triggered warnings, that hid things from sight, that burned. She teaches him other things as well, such as shelves of books served well for obscuring the prying eyes of Templars and fellow mages.

Liaisons of a romantic sort, he finds out, are discouraged by Templars, which makes the short months he spends sneaking about with Anenna all that more entertaining. She is a fascinating distraction from his obsession of escape, and he does not bother to heed a single warning from Wynne, who, Maker bless her, tries as well as any matriarch to shield him from potential pain. If Anenna's fate had been any different, Anders might even have remembered fondly the awfully awkward but hilarious conversation his surrogate mother endeavored to engage him in one evening during this affair. Fair skinned like Anders, she'd blushed terribly even as he made her laugh with his irreverent recitation of all the many things he'd heard along the lines of her lecture on _“where potential young mages came from.”_

As it turns out, Anenna, a year older than him, is compelled to undergo her Harrowing, and the point is moot after this. It is the first instance of pure shock Anders recalls since being dragged from his home five years before. Not even being found by the Templars after escape attempts had surprised him, even when he was profoundly careful.

He says goodbye to her one fall morning with words of encouragement, and never sees her again. He receives only scanty details, for even Wynne will not explain what has happened, and Templars never speak of what takes place at Harrowings. Beyond the shock, Anders remembers rage and disbelief. He does not trust the Templars to have the right of it, that Anenna truly could have failed her Harrowing and that they had been forced to kill her.

The next day, one of them passes him in the library, a statue of grief coiled alone at a table, and makes a snide comment about finding another pastime, and they find out just how dangerous the boy from the Anderfels can be.

Anders doesn't remember much about it, but they say it took three of the Templars to get control of him. There was a rug that was missing later, burned beyond salvage, and scorch marks on the table that grew stories for years to come. They tossed him in solitary confinement for a month, and only later did he find out from Wynne that there was much argument over his stability and whether he should be allowed to continue without being made Tranquil.

Their solution is to drag from his tower cell one day and take him straight to his Harrowing, with no warning. He has no time to prepare himself mentally, and he is weak with lack of sleep, little food, and the torture of being alone and lost in a sea of dark monotonous time. It is clear to him what they mean to do: push a fragile boy into a situation designed to blow up in his face, and deal with it accordingly, cleverly circumventing his benefactor.

But while Anders is skinny and stringy like a weed, ill-fed, angry and with dark circles under his eyes, he is not fragile, and they discover this. He passes through his Harrowing with an easy air of disrespect for the process, for he is impatient to prove them wrong. To stand in the face of their ill-conceived notion of his perceived weakness. It is a compulsion that defines him from that day onward. The next day, he escapes again. This time, they did not catch him for two months.

-ooo-

The Templars bring him back cuffed, chained, and gagged. He is angry, and though Wynne comes to him and tries to comfort him, for the first time since he was brought to the Circle, he does not wish to speak to her. He does not want to hear warnings, however veiled or coated in concern. He can tell that she is saddened by his withdrawal, but she heeds his state of mind, and he knows that while she fades into the swirling bleary banausic background of life in Kinloch Hold, she is still his bulwark. She, and his long-time friend and oft-times lover, Rylan Amell. 

Anders is not the same, however. Not after the last time they drag him back. He does not sleep regularly, for his dreams are haunted. There are tempting whispers from the Fade, whispers that promise power he tells himself he must resist. He is able to do so for the same reasons that he defies the Chantry and the Templars with his relentless escape routine: he will not be subjugated. By anyone, or anything.

He stops studying the healing arts, and begins minding the lessons on elemental magic. It is another mage he has only noticed in passing, a middle aged man who goes by the name Karl, who first points out to the fractious teenager that the Templars tolerate his pursuits because they want him to fail. They wish to have an excuse to put him down like the rabid beast he has become. Anders notices afterward that indeed they do watch him, like so many crows on a burdened branch, looming above his head, but he is still hot-headed and does not at first heed this new warning. As he sleeps less, his moods are darker, and his temper bubbles at the surface, ready to steam into life at the slightest intimation of an affront.

It is not Wynne that saves him from himself this time, but Karl. The older man takes the dissident mage under his wing, and he shows him two things. The first is that rebellion is a knife best placed in the back, and the second is that there are ways to bide time that do not include impending death or lobotomization.

It is Karl that first introduces him to the Mage Underground, and there is discussion of smuggling Anders out of the Circle, but the young man will have none of it. Karl trusts him eventually with a number of his contacts, and with ciphers, locations of safe houses, and what secrets of the various Circles that they know. Some of this is talk that takes place beneath blankets, for Karl introduces him to other distractions which he has never before considered. Uses of magic that have never crossed his mind.

Anders “escapes” several more times, but the part that manages never to make it into his stories later in life are that he took more than one mage with him each time. The Templars are not proud of that fact. Anders manages to be the only one caught each time, and it also does not make it into stories of the apostate renegade that he lets them find him, wandering lazily and obviously through the Ferelden countryside because he knows the dogs would follow him first. He is the prize. It gives the others time to get away, and they do.  

After the sixth escape, however, they have had enough. He has given up on his own account, and even the affection he shares with Karl and with Rylan, both of which have persisted for years, does not penetrate the depression that haunts him. He feels doomed, and only wishes to hurry his fate. He does not share this with anyone, but intends that he will not be made Tranquil, and that if he finally harries them into trying, he will force them to kill him. He sneaks a knife out of the kitchen and Karl teaches him to use it, for he knows if it comes to it, his magic will do him no good, but blade will cross blade. He knows Templars as over-reacting, likely to give a broadsword for a paring knife.

He does not know what belays the confrontation he feels he's finally brought upon himself at the time, but later finds out that the First Enchanter spoke for him. Thus he is thrown into a familiar empty room with nothing but a tattered blanket and a bucket for a chamberpot.

They leave him there for a year.

When they finally release him, he finds that the Tower is in the stirrings of the chaotic politics and fear preceding the fifth Blight. He spends a very quiet month in his proffered, prior routine, a ghost of himself, speaking little and appearing to any that look upon him as a disheveled young man with flat, dead eyes. Gradually, they stop looking, and after the fifth day that Anders counts less than three glances his way, he is ready for what he has spent a year discussing in great detail with a cat in a tower.

He washes his long blonde hair and ties it back, and dons one of Rylan's nice black robes. Then he stops by DeChamp's chambers while the Templar is at dinner, and robs two gold rings, a nice, jeweled dagger he hopes is a family heirloom, and a pouch of coins. He straps his staff to his back, and one more time, he walks out the front door, misdirection spells hanging on his shoulders like a cloak.

He is not even trying, but they don't notice him. He knows he casts fine spells, but he intends to be caught, and is not, and so he keeps walking.

They do not catch up with him until he stops at Vigil's Keep. He has fled inside to escape both the pursuing band that has followed in his wake for hours, and the more disturbing darkspawn. While he left Kinloch Hold meaning to die, the barest taste of freedom is like strong drink, right to his head, and once savored, cannot be forgotten.  

He is encountered there by a woman with a bow, and the first words out of his mouth to the Hero of Ferelden, who he would follow into battle in the wake of the Blight are, “I didn't do it.” He means he didn't kill the numerous Templars tangled with the darkspawn, strewn about the room, but it is bullshit. He did it, he'd do it again, and he thinks she knows it. And she doesn't care.

Elissa Cousland recruits him into the Grey Wardens, which is certainly not in his plan but it is a shield against the Templars that arrived to drag him back to Kinloch. And it has the charming side effect of possible death.

But he lives, whether due to some remarkable fortitude of spirit or abhorrent luck. It is in his travels that he meets Justice, and in the end, he allows the spirit to share his own body as host. The decision is much arrogance on his part, because he has lived down debilitating temptation in solitude, but it is more abject loneliness that drives his choice. It is a promise of friendship, a pure thing he will corrupt with that creeping resident anger his spirit gives life.  

In the end, he flees the Wardens as he flees everything, for they do not look kindly upon “possessed” mages in their midst. They call him a wild card, a grenade waiting to explode.

Is he? He does not know what he is anymore, nor who, when he finds himself in Kirkwall, but he is here because there is no Warden outpost, and because of the well-worn, oft-read letter he received from Karl. It is, perhaps, the worst place for a fugitive of the Circle, for Templars are ubiquitous, but he finds solace in his private rebellion, and in truth, Justice binds him here.

At first.

It is both he and Justice that greet Garrett Hawke at the end of an arduous day in his clinic in Darktown, and they are both sensitive to the aura that hangs about the man. He is preceded by a tangible dynamic, the kinesthesia of someone who always gets his way. He is demanding maps, which Anders offers only with the promise that the well armed mercenary and his hangers-on will help him do the one thing he isn't willing to risk death to attempt alone, for the price of failure is too high. Save Karl.

Hawke holds up his side of the bargain, but in the end, it doesn't matter. Karl is gone before he arrives, made Tranquil, and his request for release is met with all the force of Anders' own desire for it. It is the advent of several things.

The first is a downward spiral of resolute rage that he already feels will drag his friend, Justice, down with him. The second is coupled with the first; a gradual loss of self control.

It begins when he gives Garrett Hawke what he asks for: the Grey Warden maps. And immediately after that, offers him another thing he didn't ask for.

Himself.


	2. Prologue II: Blessed With a Name, And Burdened By Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Garrett's prologue is written entirely by winebearcat, as Anders' is written by ilyahna. While we have differing writing styles, our chapters in the future will be written together in an "RP" style that in our experience meshes so well that it is hard to tell where one of us begins and the other ends.

 

He is three years old when his parents decide to spoil him for his name-day.

His chipper mother is crouched before him with a radiant smile, attempting to fasten the strip of leather that binds the front of his tunic shut. The tunic is splotched with faded stains, for the former noblewoman purchased the cloth secondhand at the price of several coppers. Coppers earned through toiling hours of sweat-laden work, pressed into palms with hasty requisite. Yet their destitute state, highlighted by their rickety home erected with his father’s callused hands, is replete with an inestimable abundance of pure love.

For the unstable architectural rendering of their drafty abode is buttressed by Malcolm and Leandra Hawke’s scriptural adoration for their darling son.

His mother is fussing at him now, willing her only child to behave himself as she finally secures the knot of his tunic. He blinks at her with the wide cerulean eyes she has passed onto him, flowering with a matched smile when she finally presses a warm kiss to the tip of his button nose.

"Now there’s a good lad,” Malcolm beams down at him and ruffles his dark locks. 

He peers up at him ecstatically and begins squirming beneath his mother’s touch, wriggling past her lilting laugh to stretch two tiny hands toward the sagging roof.

Malcolm chuckles lovingly and bends down to scoop his son into two strong arms. He too places a kiss upon a rounded pink cheek, prompting a childish giggle, and turns to his wife with softened eyes. The young boy wrinkles in his nose in protest at their parting exchange, garbling out pseudo-babble on germs and illness.

“Stop it,” he’d once cried, much to their heart-swollen laughter, “you’ll catch germs and die.”

“Nonsense, Garrett,” his mother had assuaged and combed through his hair with slim fingers, “what of the kisses we give you?”

“They’re not on the _mouth_ ,” he’d whined in genuine revulsion.

Yet he is neither fussy nor demurring now, but rather childish in an entirely different manner when his father is nestling his small frame upon the saddle of a dark brown draught horse. His eyes widen exponentially as he feels the broad shoulders of the horse stir and ripple beneath him, choosing in this moment to look back at his father.

“Papa, why are we sitting on Lisette?” he poses with a furrowed brow.

Malcolm chuckles softly as he slips his boots into the thick leather stirrups he once crafted himself. He ensures a fastening hold on his son before he replies, “We’re riding into town, my dear boy.”

Garrett ignites with pure mirth, bristling with giddiness as his father clucks soothingly at their ancient draught horse and she begins to lumber forward. The warm breeze of a summer day rustles through his dark hair and he swivels his head to and fro, attempting to drink in the placid sights of their sleepy surroundings.

Each emerald tree is bathed in buttery sunlight, rustling with the sounds of summertime life. Each buzz, chirp, croak, whish, caw, and splash is digested in full as the wondrous child scans the clearing peppered with Elfroot and Deep Mushroom. The lazy brook that slopes its way down the perimeter of the forest edge is sprinkled in a natural weave of Spindleweed, the latter of which he possesses fond associative memories. He has spent many an hour muddied at the edge of the brook with his mother, pulling and pressing into satchels for the later purpose of grinding into bitter pastes and concoctions.

A folk remedy, his father once told him, to aid the ill.

In fact, it seems his father has endless knowledge pertaining to creating such strange mixtures. Garrett often marvels at peculiar items he finds around the home, ranging from thick, dusty tomes to depleted glass bottles that smell like charred lightning. Consequently, the young boy has consigned curiosity to intuition in determining that his kind, gentle father is also shrouded in arcane mystery 

Within a quarter of an hour, they have arrived within the village square of Lothering; a small, sleepy settlement nestled within central Ferelden on the edge of the Hinterlands. Part of the Arling of South Reach, Lothering is an unassuming trading post between Redcliffe, Orzammar, and the fortress of Ostagar that relies upon milling and agriculture to sustain its small economy.

It is the fourth time Garrett has visited the village square, and the first by horseback. He is grinning and wild-eyed by the time his father hoists him from the horse’s tall stature, drunk with joy and awe at the wide-open world of the Ferelden countryside. Once they hitch Lisette to a post, Malcolm plants a hand on his boy’s back and ushers him through the village, smiling and nodding at those who greet father and son with lit eyes.

Garrett cannot but help waving at each face, many folded and creased by the arduous toils of the countryside, and he is guided into a dimly lit shop anointed with heavy scents that lay thick on one’s tongue.

_“Bonjour, mon petit prince,”_ a middle-aged woman beams from behind the counter.

Garrett recognizes her as Madame de Fontaine; an Orlesian woman long wed to a Ferelden baker with an iron will and a bleeding heart. He smiles at her and attempts a response in gibberish that is neither Orlesian nor Ferelden, thus prompting the small room to erupt in gleeful laughter.

“It is a marvelous day, little one,” she coos in her muddled accent and turns to proffer a covered dish, “for it is when the Maker blessed your mother and father with your radiance.”

She uncovers the dish then to reveal two different pastries, freshly baked, and oozing with aromatic fruit. Garrett’s eyes widen and his jaw drops, lips forming a perfect ‘o’ that elucidates his innocent disbelief.

“Well then lad,” Malcolm chuckles and ruffles his tiny head, “they aren’t going to eat themselves.”

He snaps his head up to meet him with an incredulous stare, heart bursting as he begins to vibrate with stream of confirmative questions that are answered successively with a single word: yes.

Thus he expends the remaining morning cavorting around the village square, fueled by a rush of energy that coats his mouth in heady saccharine. His fingers are stained purple, belly swollen with indulgence, and he is buzzing about with strident laughter. Malcolm’s pockets are several coppers lighter, as he had piled on a seventh day of work to afford the treats.

Yet it is not long after that Garrett is asleep against him, lulled to a colorful slumber via the soothing cradle of Lisette beneath them. He is safe inside the arm that his father secures around his small chest, and he descends into a dream speckled with blueberries, pastries, sunshine, and little princes; mumbling to himself with sticky lips that this is the best day of his short life.

-ooo-

He is five years old when his twin siblings are born and he prays vigorously to Andraste such that she will swoop down from the heavens and snatch the two piglets back up.

“They’re ugly,” he pouts with jealousy and rubs at his swollen eyes.

“Garrett,” his father frowns at him, “they are your siblings. Your blood.”

“I want nothing to do with them,” he protests and shakes his head, “they’ve made Mama ill. They’re loud. I loathe them.”

Malcolm’s frown deepens and he kneels down before his son. They are by the brook in the clearing where he discovered a weepy Garrett blubbing profusely.

He now places two sturdy hands upon his shoulders and peers at him with golden brown eyes that were passed down onto one of the runts.

“Your mother is not ill,” he begins, “she is resting. And you mustn’t fling spiteful words without understanding the weight that they bear. They are your siblings, Garrett. The Maker willed it so, and His will shall endure even past our time in this realm. You are my flesh and blood, and they are yours. Nothing can or ever will change this truth. Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?”

Malcolm continues to gaze at him patiently, but the sniffling lad is stubborn and drills his pouting stare into the lush patch of grass beneath their worn boots. A heavy moment labors between them until he nods with sagged shoulders, whether out of comprehension or resignation he does not know.

“But… You won’t have the time to love me anymore,” he contends past a hiccup and his eyes remain averted.

Another moment of silence endures before his father’s rumbling laughter slices through the viscosity of the atmosphere. The rich stream of baritone notes startles him and he is immediately pulled into Malcolm’s arms for a warm embrace.

“Oh, my sweet boy, I don’t think it earthly possible to love you more than I already do,” he assuages and buries a kiss somewhere in his unruly hair.

“I would do anything for you,” he declares and pulls away to look him in the eye fiercely, “for all of you. Your mother, your brother, and your sister.”

Garrett blinks and he is still clutching onto his father’s tall, broad frame. His own tiny stature is bubbling with straggling hiccups as he attempts to nod.

“We are a family. Neither death nor union can sever the meaning of this claim. It is why it is imperative we protect one another. There are people in this world who seek to separate us,” he continues and the young lad’s eyes widen fearfully.

“No!” he exclaims and flings his arms around his father’s neck.

Malcolm does not flinch, instead enveloping his desperate son between his arms.

“Yes, Garrett,” he murmurs softly, “which is why I need you to promise me that you will protect what is ours. You are my eldest. That means this responsibility falls to you after myself. You are blessed with a name and burdened by blood to uphold such an obligation. Spiteful thoughts are trivial. Fleeting. Your siblings are not."

Garrett grips onto him tightly, and after a lengthy moment, nods into his shoulder.

“I promise.”

It is a character defining promise, one that will define the man he will become and burden his conscience until he expends his last and final breath. Driven by morality and underscored by virtue, it is a responsibility inscribed into his very core, where the blood inside his veins pumps richly with the keystone of his highest philosophical Truth: family.

-ooo-

He is eight years old when his magical capabilities surface.

It is a stifling day, with summertime heat laid thick upon one’s flesh. Oppressive, blanketing each pore and wringing volumes of sweat out of any victim exposed to its wrath. Garrett returns from the wheat fields with a sunburn and his tongue lolling past parched lips. He enters the threshold of the abode with his father beside him and both share the image of black locks smeared across their foreheads. Garrett’s hair curls slightly in response to the humidity and his eyes screw shut with exhaustion.

His mind begins to drift, entering some delirious reverie entailing ice baths and lapping water, yet his tranquil vision is immediately punctuated by the harsh sound of shattering clay. His eyes fly open at the piercing clamor only to find his mother with rounded eyes. She is holding his sister in her lap while his brother lolls at her feet, and as if on cue, the twins simultaneously begin to wail. 

“Malcolm,” Leandra strains with an accusatory glare and attempts to assuage the toddlers with pats.

All of their gazes linger upon the pile of broken shards that once comprised a handmade vase, save for his father, who gazes wordlessly upon the damp mop of his son’s hair.

“Leandra,” he finally murmurs, shaking his head, “this was not I." 

Garrett does not grasp the thinly veiled complexity of the exchange. Yet in a blur, he is immediately whisked outside by his father and crushed into his drenched embrace. He splutters against his malodorous stench and attempts to wriggle his way out of the grip, peppering each moment with a heightened complaint. Finally, after a moment, Malcolm pulls away and gazes at him with swimming eyes.

“Oh son, my darling son,” he beams and Garrett blinks dubiously, “you’re a _mage_.”

He blinks harder, for he scarcely comprehends the significance of the assertion.

It is a statement of fact that permanently alters the course of his life. Though, rather than repelling those closest to him with his power, it is celebrated. Dressed with encouragements and fortified with Malcolm’s mentorship, Garrett slowly begins to harness and control the mana he was blessed with. The door creaks open to his father’s arcane, mysterious world, and he presses his nose to impenetrable tomes larger than his own skull.

“Magic is a gift,” his father says to him one day, “you must always remember that.”

It is a philosophy deeply imbedded into him over the course of this blissful year. His tongue tastes the acrid drops of lyrium for the first time, prompting him to reel backwards with a bursting cough. Further, he is taught strange words that fill his mouth and curious mind with wonder:

Apostate. Circle. Veil. Fade. Phylactery. Mana. Grey Warden.

He learns of the last term when he discovers a faded pendant among his father’s belongings that depicts a winged griffon. His inquiry receives grandiose tales of the fabled order, and his eyes flood with stars to learn that his own father, his very idol, once worked alongside such Thedosian heroes. He understands that the full richness of his life as an apostate is a blessing very few mages are privy to, and thus the lesson most insistently drilled into his physical memory is how to quell and conceal his ability. Yet he too learns how to cast basic spells and quickly exhibits a penchant for elemental magic.

Lightning soon becomes his preferred element of destruction, and on nights where rain buckets from the sky he scampers outside with a grin plastered on his face. Each time, his father watches as he thrusts a hand up toward the gaping mouth of the churning atmosphere. Small fingertips unleash a crack of lightning and Garrett flings his head back with unadulterated laughter soon drowned out by the natural rumble of thunder. Rain drenches him through the core, though he pays no mind, for it is nights such as these, with thunder booming overhead, magic crackling from fingertips, and his hooting father beside him, where he feels utterly uninhibited.

Uninhibited. Powerful. Free.

-ooo-

He is fifteen years old when he beds the blacksmith’s daughter for the first time. 

She is of the reticent sort, budding on the cusp of physical womanhood yet possessing a naïve tenor that belies the feminine curve of her hips. Her cheeks flourish with a splendid blush when the ever-charming Garrett whispers into her ear one eve, insisting that the miller’s barn on the outskirts of the village would provide the appropriate amount of discretion and ambiance for the culmination of their tenuous rapport.

A rapport characterized by shy smiles, stolen kisses, and interlaced hands, yet his prediction of a romantic night filled with bliss is shattered by the harsh reality of fumbling hands, sexual inexperience, and the smell of manure.

It is over as quickly as it began, and as the blacksmith’s daughter rolls out from beneath him with a disappointed huff, he sinks deeply into the scratchy swathe of hay and blankets himself with his absolute shame.

He is awoken that morning with a cold bucket of water dumped on his head and the village miller cursing him all the way back to his home, where upon entering the threshold of his abode his parents drink in his sopping appearance, the tufts of hay wedged in his hair, and the several hours of sleep tainting his eyes.

They laugh richly and omnisciently, allowing him a bath and a nap before cornering him with a conversation that no child would ever want to entertain with their parents.

He is thoroughly mortified, both with his performance (or lack thereof) and the phrase _fervent loins_ , thus prompting him to never again indulge in such concupiscent pleasures before first preparing himself.

Garrett is adamant in this conviction, and he is well aware of his own arresting appearance. It is one gifted by genetics and honed by his penchant for physical outdoor activities, yet partially hindered by adolescence. Regardless, he is tall in stature, and his shoulders are broadening in conjunction with his developing jawline. He attempts to grow out his facial stubble after this debacle, only managing a pitiful, scraggly calamity that prompts the hasty scrapes of a shaving razor and a harsh pinch to his brother’s back after being called a “bespawling Chantry boy.”

Thus over the course of many months he hones his craft, sharpening his wit on the wheel of literary knowledge and whittling his body with strenuous activities requested of him around Lothering. His facial hair has been consigned to tamed stubble, and it is between his sixteenth and seventeenth name-days when he gains quite a reputation for his youthful pillaging of the village daughters.

_The Chronicle of Sexual Appropriation_ (as his father would retrospectively coin it) begins with re-conquesting the blacksmith’s daughter.

He does so successfully, effectively devolving her into a starry-eyed puddle that drips between his strong fingers. They endure thirteen blissful days together before Garrett leaves her for the baker’s daughter.

Then the baker’s daughter is spurned for the cloth merchant’s.

The cloth merchant’s for the innkeeper’s.

The innkeeper’s for the barman’s.

Until one day, when his mother finally sits him down just shy of his seventeenth name-day.

“Garrett,” she sighs loudly, “if this doesn’t stop we’ll be run out with pitchforks.”

He blinks, suddenly sheepish beneath the weight of her gaze. His father looms behind her, a hand placed upon her shoulder, yet a smile ripples across his lips as he declares:

“Behold, Leandra, the lad who once gravely feared the transmission of germs.”

Garrett stifles a laugh into his hand, and while his father’s tone is neither sycophantic nor contemptuous, it bears an edge of lighthearted mockery that only fathers may bestow upon their rapscallion sons.

“Malcolm, this is no cause for humor,” his mother sighs with burden, “this is shameful behavior.”

“Mother, I’ve no bastard children to date,” he smiles that quintessentially tantalizing smile – the Hawke smile, or so the inhabitants of Lothering have come to credit it – one that stretches ear to ear and is punctuated with a single deep dimple on his left cheek. 

It mirrors his father’s as she lightly swats them both with a huff, commanding that her eldest shall find himself within in the walls of a Chantry or Maker help her before she drags him there by his permanently shut ear. Though he concedes without any protest, for despite the sanctified degree of forbearance that his father possesses toward his unscrupulous behavior, it is his mother who he has and shall always defer to.

He almost thinks it a curse, the way in which he bends to her will with zero remonstration, but the truth of the matter is that Garrett Hawke has never and could never say no to his mother.

Thus, he later finds himself half dozing off during a sermon in the Chantry until he is tapped on the shoulder and rendered fully conscious. He attempts to dispel the fatigue from his eyes with several hard blinks and opens his mouth to craft some pretense, yet the Lay Brother looming over him prompts him to clamp his lips shut.

His bewildered stare meets the warm copper gaze of the Lay Brother, whose eyes are rounded into two perfect spheres of apology. His brow is knitted, lips parted around a silent syllable, and he bears the sharp bone structure typical of nobility and not peasantry. His mop of dark blonde hair is trimmed down into a traditional fashion required of all male Chantry members and while Garrett inspects him for any indication of rabid bespawling, as he and his brother have so lovingly consigned the imagery to all Chantry members, he finds none.

Further, it is the Lay Brother who is now apologizing to Garrett Hawke.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” he manages and a light pink blush sears his fair, freckled countenance.

Garrett widens his eyes slightly, and entirely unbeknownst to him begins _The Chronicle of Sexual Self-Actualization_ (as he himself would retrospectively coin it; though the original, lengthier one he’d had in mind had utilized the terms carnal sin and salvation).

In his opinion, this is the period in which he finds himself closest to the Maker.

This fact is both figuratively and literally true, for the former finds him attending the dullest of sermons on a regular basis, which no doubt greatly pleases his mother. Yet as his unprincipled behavior begins to decline as a consequence of his seemingly pious conduct, his intentions remain flagrantly poor.

He marks the soft-spoken Lay Brother, an acolyte from north Ferelden, not for any malicious or self-ingratiating reason but simply because his lips yearn to sap from the source of his radiating warmth - perhaps in more places than one. While Brother Henry Grey may be a man of the cloth, Garrett is determined to find out exactly what is underneath those Chantry sanctioned robes. The desire is magnetic, intoxicating even, though the eldest Hawke boy is no stranger to acknowledging his shared attraction toward men.

It has been a flowering inkling haunting his soul for as long as he can remember, perhaps first recognized as a small boy though never acted upon. Further, the ambiguity of his sexual disposition has not gone unnoticed by his parents, which they do not question or inhibit in any manner.

Thus their friendship blossoms over the course of several weeks vis-à-vis some feigned interest in certain scriptures, which bleed into hushed conversations. Such conversations, initially marked by religious topics, begin to divert toward religio-political subjects. Philosophical. Botanical. Astronomical. Theoretical. Academic subjects that would not necessarily be Chantry sanctioned knowledge. In fact, within the other’s presence they choose to verbally operate outside the paradigms of the Ferelden socioeconomic class structure and top-down hierarchy of the Chantry that places them at their respective low-rung positions in what Garrett discerns to be a short and brutish life.

In electing to do so, they one day find themselves in the confessional room where Garrett has requested a private tête-à-tête to “relinquish himself of his burdening sins.”

Paradoxically, the confession ends with their lips pressed against the other and Brother Henry with his back pushed up against the stone wall.

Garrett has never been with a man before, but his mouth tastes mildly honeyed. Not lovely rhetoric – no - but quite literally honeyed and laced with some grade of herbs that had clearly been a recently consumed meal. In fact, this is rougher with coarse lips and not the plush femininity he has grown so accustomed to.

It is as warm as stoked embers broiling in the pit of his belly.

He nearly deepens the kiss, but sojourns when he senses the inflexible rigidity of the Lay Brother’s frame against his. Pulling away abruptly to meet his stunned, frozen stare, he immediately fumbles backward with a massive apology beginning to bubble on his lips. Yet when a hand shoots out to grip the front of his tunic, he eyes the bunched fist warily before snaking his gaze up to the stolid countenance of his comrade.

It would become glaringly apparent that his gentle, timid Lay Brother is neither gentle nor timid, but darkly insistent with a marred past that chased him all the way from Denerim to the Ferelden countryside.

Garrett is later confessed this truth, but for now he is stalked backward and shoved down onto a kneeling altar. His palms grip the edges of the stand as he begins to tremble with some amalgamation of delirium, fear, and exhilaration. While he attempts to maintain any semblance of composure, the Lay Brother offers him a ghost of a smirk before he is on his knees.

It is therefore by some delicious act of blasphemous irony where Garrett attains sexual enlightenment. Whether pious or impious, as a warm tongue trained for scriptural oration now works the eldest Hawke boy toward the proverbial edge, the Chantry Brother positioned between his quaking thighs gladly exhibits his highest form of devotion for their newfound “companionship.”

Garrett’s fingers dig into his scalp desperately as he issues muffled whimpers. An icon of blessed Andraste, the Lady Redeemer and Bride of the Maker, drills Her stare into the back of his arched head. Further, the triptych of Her immolation hangs on ancient stone behind them, casting their session in a morose ambiance that hemorrhages around them. Yet it seems to stop at the raised dais upon where their feet are splayed, allowing the most dignified pair an island of sanctuary as Garrett soon begins to tremor beneath the weight of his pleasure.

It is not long before a hot jolt sears his veins and the apex of this pleasure consumes him. Fledged with the blinding exhilaration of sexual exploration, he shivers out every shred of himself with a rumble emanating from his core. Brother Henry’s head is bowed, reverent in his comportment, and he allows a twitching moment to labor by before erecting to his full height. He is a fraction shorter yet bears several more years than the breathless young man before him, to whom he offers a smile and the final remark of his imparting proselytization:

“I believe our session has concluded.”

For the official record, Garrett Hawke would like to include an addendum upon the term _sexual self-actualization_ : slather on six months of utter infatuation before he can even begin to wade through anything remotely resembling reflection. Instead, it is a period marked by deepened conversations, kisses, and emotions. Though any activity between them, whether cerebral or highly physical, is permanently shrouded in furtiveness.

He loses much of himself to this man, not that he would have ever wanted any of it back, for it is not without receiving a piece of this person in return. Garrett certainly lacks the experience that Henry possesses, so it is without question that the complicated Brother takes all remaining tatters of vestal innocence from the eldest Hawke boy. Though Garrett quickly learns of the price of “taboo desires” when he is told that his newly established lover was implicitly excommunicated from the Kingdom’s capital for having reprehensible relations. Though depending on socioeconomic circumstance, purely physical forms of such relations are discreetly acceptable. Emotional forms are not.

Thus one learns not to hope for more.

He surely is not naïve enough to hope for more, but he does. He does, and thus it is the first time in his life that he cares for another outside of his nuclear family. Though it is not the act of caring for another man, of laying with another man, that ends their seemingly doomed relationship, but the inherent power he was both gifted and cursed with.

It is a power that challenges his humanity, some would argue.

Of course, his father would vehemently contend this claim, but according to Chantry protocol, mages are inherently dangerous beings.

While two Ferelden men in love would face a similar accusation, they are not typically consigned to the same degree of social anathema as a child exhibiting magical ability for the first time. 

Hence one fateful night, as an apostate melds his weight upon that of a Lay Brother’s, he loses himself for only a moment. His lips are buried into his neck, breath throaty and ragged, when his hips find a particularly marvelous angle. Blinded and spiraling, he cannot control the surge of mana that escapes his fingertips. He casts before he is even aware of the nature of the spell and freezes in sheer horror. His fingers, previously curled around the bulk of a bicep, now tremble. The tunic has been licked by flame, yet he nearly sighs to discover that his indiscretion did not permanently mark fair skin.

His relief is soon replaced by dread, however, when he meets the terrified stare of his now trembling lover.

_Apostate._

The spoken word, issued in a quivering voice, is the first time it breathes anguish into his very being.

Thus it is on this terrible night when an apostate comes to a tacit agreement with a young man attempting to smother his sexual disposition beneath the weight of the cloth. They exchange one terrible secret for the other to burden and bury, for neither of them chose their natures but must suffocate them with unrepentant, stifling fingers. What Garrett was never told, or rather, what he now attempts to weave together, is that the extorting price of slipping unseen into the mold exacted by societal norms is the loss of oneself. 

Breathless, faceless, and fractured.

Garrett sits at the dining room table for nearly three days, burning the outline of the wooden door into his optic memory. With a straightened spine and resigned air, he half expects the Templars to appear at any moment. Yet as laboring time would reveal, they do not materialize. The breath of exhalation that leaves his chest is alleviating, yet singes the edges of his lungs. Thus he gathers the shards of himself and never returns to the Chantry, instead choosing to permanently bury the single fragment that was foolish enough to hope for more. Beside it he places the piece of collateral that maintained the union of his family, and with shortness of breath he bids farewell to a complicated man’s damning secret.

Consequently, he spends the last couple of months leading up to his eighteenth name-day with the blacksmith’s daughter, with whom this entire saga began; though if he’d learned anything at all, it was that the taste of honey and herbs far usurps the taste of ash.

-ooo-

He is nineteen years old when his father falls critically ill. 

It begins one unassuming morning when the man does not stir from bed before the rising sun. His absence at the dining table for breakfast is punctuated by the inquisitive silence bleeding from his children as they peer at his empty seat. Finally, it is Beth who breathes life into the question they all harbor, issuing it directly at their mother with a drawn brow.

“Where is Papa?” she inquires as sunlight begins to filter in through the window.

His absence would not be so notable if not for his pattern of behavior set long before the birth of his children. Habitually, he rises from slumber at the first signal of predawn birds chirping throughout the surrounding forest. Even in the wintertime, when the birds fall silent and their branches hang bare, his body serves as a metronome finely attuned to the principles of punctuality and concision.

Perhaps it can be argued that no man is more familiar with his own body than a mage.

Whether it is his mana – his primordial, defining essence – that inherently connects him to the Fade, each emotion, intuition, intention, or lack thereof tugs at the Veil. His very disposition can manipulate elemental forces beyond the reach of most, strengthening or thinning the unseen barrier that separates the supernatural from the natural, and thus at a young age must consider it a necessity to wholly familiarize himself with his corporeal limits and the spectrum of his temperament.

Yet notwithstanding magical capabilities, the privilege of fatherhood has granted this particular mage keen insight into the strength of genetics as his raven-haired offspring now sit at the breakfast table with puzzled expressions. Unbeknownst to them, Malcolm Hawke is not in control of his own body for the first time in his life. 

It is the eldest, the one created most in his image, who is first to realize this truth. He begins to suspect that the excess lethargy his father exhibits over the next several weeks is not due to laborious overexertion, but something far graver and unseen. His suspicions are confirmed when the vomiting begins. Its intensity varies, often occurring as an upheaval of every shred though sometimes as mere dribbles of acidic spittle. Motor functions begin to decline shortly after, and the mage can no longer maintain a sense of balance. He stumbles and teeters, gripping onto anything and everything that could salvage him, whether it is a support beam that maintains the structural integrity of their home, or his petrified wife, with whom he has shared the cosmic axis.

A sacred place. A celestial and geographic pole, connecting the ethereal with the corporeal. A sagging home in central Ferelden, where earth is closest to sky, that occupies the center of the world.

Their three children surround him when he is officially deemed bedridden, with salted tears stinging thick black lashes. They observe as the potency of his once powerful magic now only offers licks of healing, for his mana has weakened in conjunction with his strength. The restoration spells that have kept him marginally afloat struggle to pull from the Veil, until they flicker and putter out altogether at the tips of his callused fingers.

Thus it is one fateful afternoon when their mother solemnly ushers a healer into their household.

“It is the brain,” it is finally pronounced at his bedside, “a malfunction of the brain.”

_A malfunction of the brain._

It rings as a death knell.

Garrett can see it on his mother’s face, the way in which the spark at the edges of her eyes dims. He can hear it in her hurried, hushed prayers, as desperate mantras tumble from her throat faster than her lips can form them. He can feel it in her trembling hands, when he clasps them gently, insisting that he will helm the particular chore or duty she has begun to disintegrate over.

A viscous, asphyxiating weight settles upon the Hawke abode. The shadow of augury, hemorrhaging into every crevice of their home and sapping the mirth from its structure, now taints each conscience. They are paralyzed, zombified even, as their mother’s fervent prayers fall upon the Maker’s deafened ears.

Yet Garrett finds himself cursing the deistic religion, asserting that perhaps it is not humanity who has failed Him, but it is He who has failed all that He has created. 

Thus, as time expends, an impenetrable cynicism begins to infect his core. Words become biting, thoughts dark, and suggestions desperate. His sister approaches him one day with one such proposal, tears rolling down her cheeks and a stream of snot leaking from a nostril.

“Garrett,” she hitches, “Garrett, what if we take him to Kinloch Hold? The Circle… it must have healers, they can save him. They’ll take him, but he’ll live, he won’t have to… he won’t…”                                    

She trails to hiccup uncontrollably and swipe at her ruddy cheeks. He blinks at her, drinking in her shuddering shoulders, and he immediately stands from his seated position.

“They’ll take us as well, Beth. You and I. What of Mother and Carver?” he poses with a furrowed brow.

“I don’t know,” she ruptures and sobs into her slender fingers, “p-perhaps that is the sacrifice we must make. Confinement in exchange f-for life.”

“We’ll all be sent to separate Circles,” he says softly and she further dissolves.

Yet her stuttering frame is smothered by her brother’s enveloping embrace, and she buries her nose into his shoulder. She is a gangly creature, caught in the throes of budding adolescence with a jutting collarbone and a build so frail that Garrett fears bruising her inside his hold. However, she is keen; cogently sharper than he with a quill and tome, and thus it is both a suggestion and a plea when he says: 

“We must learn the healing arts.”

It is quickly agreed upon and the two apostates, both of whom have yet to spend more than two decades on Thedosian soil, desperately attempt to glean, comprehend, and apply the arcane knowledge of spirit healers. Done without the formal training one would typically acquire in a Circle, both Garrett and Beth comb through dusty tomes that their father keeps in a locked chest.

“Healing spells,” Beth begins and attempts to wind her thick raven mane with a strip of leather, “use energy acquired from benevolent spirits in the Fade. Fortitude, Compassion, and Hope. They do not seek to cross the Veil on their own, but can be summoned to do so. We act as a… conduit for the spirit’s power, if you will.”

“Beth, this sounds dangerous. A conduit? We could attract something much darker instead. What if a demon is posing as a benevolent spirit? I… I don’t know. Spirit healers are heavily trained. It’s why they have Harrowings and trials,” Garrett murmurs nervously.

“You sound like Carver right now,” she snaps and he blinks at her.

Yet Carver is in fact consulted over their plan, for both mages consider the paradox that has formed in the wake of desperation: the ostracizing position that the third Hawke child has been consigned to in lacking magical abilities.

Thus the trio embarks on a fatalistic path toward studying and harnessing the healing arts. Carver, the non-magical creature among the three, is apportioned the task of combing through tomes and poorly bound pamphlets for useful information. Upon discovering any shred of knowledge, it is immediately transferred to Beth, who drills each incantation into the back of her skull. Garrett attempts the same nearly torturous pattern, and as scratching quills deplete inkpots deep into hushed, fractured nights, time decrees that the two mages must begin executing their subpar comprehension of restoration magic. It begins with tiny nicks upon the finger, and the three watch in budding optimism as skin reseals without leaving a mark. Their hope burgeons, building in the pit of the belly as Beth and Garrett remain on equal footing in regards to skill.

During this period, Garrett’s twentieth name-day passes uneventfully (save for the gift of a Mabari pup), though he now bears an adequate arsenal of magical restoration knowledge. He bickers amongst his siblings about the ethicality of maiming and healing an animal, even if acquired from the wild overgrowth of the forest. Thus, at the behest of his own terrible suggestion, the three find themselves inserted deep within their familiar, beloved forest. Beth and Carver sit before him, cross-legged, with uncertainty swimming in their eyes. His recently acquired Mabari pup, Rue, hangs haphazardly in his lap and offers a single upward look of concerned disbelief. She whines inconsolably when his sister hands him a dagger with a grim expression, and he accepts it wordlessly.

Blessed with a name and burdened by blood, the words ring clearly in his mind.

Garrett places the tip of the dagger upon the bulk of his forearm and his steely gaze flicks between his siblings’ widened eyes. With gritted teeth, he applies pressure and attempts to swallow a piercing cry as the dagger plunges into his flesh. Red-hot pain sears his veins, and it pools in his ears where his heart begins to thunder. Rue howls and paws at him, though he disregards her pleas. Metal grinds deeper into muscle, tearing through tightly knitted tissue and sinew, finally prompting the scream to flood out from his throat. Tears leak liberally from the corners of his eyes and he clenches them shut, twisting the blade deeper until he feels it dully connect with bone. He is relegated to a stultified sobbing, and balls the front of his tunic to stuff into his mouth. His vision blurs for only a moment, though it quickly seeps with bright spots as warm crimson blood begins to leak from his wound.

Beth clasps his face with trembling fingers and he senses the Veil begin to thin. She casts, shakily at first, straining to pull unfathomable energy from the Fade. He can feel the cooling tingle of power that seeps from her fingertips and his eyes slip shut. The blister of pain is muffled, yet he unleashes another grating scream when his brother wraps his fingers around the handle of the dagger and wrenches it from his flesh. Blood oozes liberally from the self-inflicted gash, and his sister immediately covers it with a quaking palm. The firm grip of her hand acts as a bulwark against the tide of blood and she attempts to infuse the cool rush of a restoration spell. He hisses, eyes blinking past stinging tears as her mana summons and channels vitality from across the Veil, and Carver watches the chaos unfold with an incomprehensive stare. He cannot sense the waning elasticity of the Veil around them, nor can he discern the way in which his brother’s arm sluggishly begins to mend. Beth offers a toothy smile, one signifying the path to victory, but Garrett continues to groan out his agony. A hand is clutching his Mabari pup to his side, where she offers soothing licks upon the wrist of his unmarred arm. As he feels the revitalizing strands of primordial energy stitching tissue and sinew whole once more, his eyes slip shut when he enters a state of dissociation. Vision flooding black, ears drowning out familiar voices, he cannot help but hear only one tickling inside his ear.

This is all for naught; an impetuous, reckless abandonment of all logic executed with utter otiosity.

It is a claim he does not contend, but as his blood begins to pool gracelessly around the heels of his boots, he considers, if only for the briefest of moments, that this is indeed the burden he must bear as a Hawke.

Though hours later, upon discovering the evidence of their brash folly, his mother slaps him and hitches with a strangled sob. The twins cower behind his stature, one that looms over their crumbling mother, and Garrett too attempts to wrestle back his tears. His forearm is heavily bandaged, stitched together with slapdash magic and black remedial thread via his sister’s sewing needle and good intentions. Its garish appearance lends more concern to the imagination than truly warranted, for the wound is sealed albeit inelegantly.

It will leave a trail of scar tissue that spans a fraction of his forearm, puckering mutilated flesh to serve as a permanent reminder of his inadequacies as a mage and as a son.

Consequently, they shuffle into their father’s dimly lit quarters an unmarked amount of time later and all huddle around his bed with sheepish, averted eyes. The tale is recounted with shame and atonement, interlacing with the whisper of a dwindling candle, until their words fall silent when Malcolm feebly reaches out for his eldest son’s hand. Garrett offers it uninhibitedly and his father clasps it, anchoring himself, before he slides the other up his damaged arm. His throat constricts as their eyes meet and he receives a weak smile in exchange. A tear slips down his cheek when he senses the restoration spell leaking from his fingers, for his father has not cast in weeks and thus utilizes his last shreds of visceral energy to conjure such magic. Garrett feels the inexplicably cooling sensation of formerly untapped tissue knitting back together, yet what he presumes to be a typically powerful spell now wheezes and sputters in an attempt to further heal. His eyes slip shut with culpability, allowing the shallow stream of magic to temporarily kiss away burn, ward off infection, and soothe his broken temperament. His father’s magic soon dissipates with a benevolent farewell and he whimpers woefully when he feels the brush of chapped lips upon his knuckles. Garrett’s eyes open when his hand is released and observes the mage’s gaze slowly traversing its way between all three of his children.

His daughter first, who bears his wife’s heart-shaped face, folds with anguish as her bottom lip warbles mildly. He appraises her shock blue eyes, the splash of freckles across her pale nose, and the gangling stature that she is temporarily consigned. Next is her twin, the stoic lad with unmistakable features, painted with deep brown eyes and echoes the likeness of his father. His jawline is developing, shoulders broadening, as he slowly coaxes his way into adolescence. Yet it is his eldest, with whom he finally gazes upon with a weak smile, which truly bears his image. He is a man now, with the build and facial hair to defend such a claim, though his expressive eyes, the only gift of his mother’s, shall eternally bear the glimmer of youthfulness that once ignited at the sight of blueberry pastries.

“Leandra,” he murmurs softly as he beholds his children, “look at what we’ve created.”

These are the last words that Hawke hears his father speak.

-ooo-

He is twenty-three years old when the Blight enters Lothering.

It arrives just days after the warning from Ostagar in the south reached the village, thus leaving its inhabitants scarcely protected. Hawke rifles through his father’s belongings until he stumbles upon his intended purpose: two staves caked in a film of dust. He thrusts one wordlessly at his sister, ensures that his brother is equipped with sword and shield from his preliminary training with the Ferelden army, and fastens his mother with a dagger. Rue is snarling beside him, every strand of fur on the back of her neck standing on end, and with a single nod, the Hawke family leaves behind everything they have ever built, owned, and cherished.  

The only token Hawke thinks to take is the faded Grey Warden pendant once belonging to his father, perhaps as a sentimental keepsake or perhaps as a baseless beacon of light to ward off the insurmountable Blight. 

As they depart, the tactical formation they establish is defensive in nature, designed to protect his mother and, what he will not admit aloud, his sister. She anchors the back, perpetually an arms length from their mother, while the Hawke boys assume aggressive positions on either side of her. Rue holds the forefront, baring her lethal set of canine teeth, and the group gradually hacks, slices, casts, and rips its way through pockets of darkspawn.

When they stumble across the flame-haired woman and her Templar husband on their way to the docks, there is little time for rancorous debate. He plants himself before his mother and sister at the next onslaught of darkspawn. Though what he realizes in belated horror is that he has broken their efficient formation.

He watches helplessly as the ogre charges for his baby brother, blood running cold when he hears the sounds of snapping bones and the subsequent, unmistakable thud of a lifeless body.

He has no time to mourn, and he is rushed through a blur of events that his memory often chooses to repress. The last shred of recollection he has, one that recurs as a twisted, cyclical echo in his nightmares, is his instinctive decision to set his brother’s corpse on fire. He scarcely remembers weeping uncontrollably over Carver’s limp frame, shrieking out pleas and rants and curses, as he peers into a looking glass. The lifeless form of his brother, the unembellished image of himself at age seventeen, lays fragmented before him. With the cast of a hand, he ignites the corpse to ensure that it will not become corrupted by the taint. A mantra of broken apologies spill from his lips as the burnt flesh of his kin fills his nostrils.

Flames consume what remains of Carver Hawke, and his older brother bids him a choked farewell as he defiles him in the name of love.

Hawke hears neither the sobs of his mother and sister nor the soft prayers of the Templar, instead descending into a blackout haze of stunned automation. In fact, he does not regain cognizance until he wakes within the bowels of a ship only to immediately vomit out every shred of himself, whether from grief or seasickness, he does not know.

He finally hears his mother beside him when she sobs for seven days straight, howling and clutching onto him. All he can do is hold her as he steeps in his own silence, losing himself to cannibalizing thoughts for hours on end, until finally, on the eighth day, the Free Marches breaches the view of the horizon.

Garrett Hawke enters Kirkwall City a haunted, hollowed young man with guilt and failure scorching his bones. The Grey Warden pendant burns a hole against his thigh, and with gritted teeth he finds himself scouring Kirkwall’s underbelly for a source of income, no matter how sordid the deeds.

No longer driven by morality. No longer underscored by virtue. He feels his blood harden as he considers the remaining tatters of his family: his mother and sister.

He will not fail this time. He will protect. He will support.

Thus he finds himself part of the Red Iron mercenary company without a second thought. Consequently, he develops an air of unflinching insistence out of necessity that carries him one day through the doors of a dilapidated clinic in Darktown.

Hawke senses the Veil thinning before he bursts through the door and appraises the healer with his own eyes. He senses the power of his magic, observing with a lick of curiosity as the fellow mage flickers blue before punctuating the moment with a blatant demand.

Anders and Hawke strike a deal, and the bartering terms fall within the limits of acceptable logic for the latter man.

A means to an end. No less, no more.

Yet later on, after both men have upheld their ends of the bargain, Hawke finds himself attempting to comfort the mourning man. Why, he does not know, for he is an utter stranger with whom he owes no debt or shred of consolation.

Though in this very moment, as a lost man offers a glimmer of kindness that he thought long buried, he does not consider that Anders the healer is perhaps more than a means to an end. Much more, that demands what Garrett Hawke has never given to anyone but his own:

Himself. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are always appreciated! Thank you for the kudos thus far!


	3. A Damn Good Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Perspectives in this story will sometimes change. When they do, the symbol -ooo- will appear to indicate this has occurred. Thanks for reading, and for all the kudos and comments!

Anders does not have his boots on.

In retrospect, it was probably an invitation for disaster, but at the moment, he didn’t care. While the Wounded Coast is supposed to be rife with danger (and often is), it is many other things as well. Namely, not the slime slicked streets of Darktown, little better than a sewer, or the cobbled, sun-cracked and dusty avenues of Kirkwall. Here, he can feel the sand beneath his toes, its wonderful, shifting granules eliciting scores of delightful sensations.

They are walking close to the shore, partly at Anders’ request, and partly because Hawke and Isabela are on the lookout for a skiff bringing in a shipment they are to collect and return to Kirkwall unmolested. The sand at the juncture of the water and the beach is warm and unstable in places, but imparts the incalescence of a swollen yellow sun, which hangs bright in the sky almost directly above them, the briny sea air having scoured away the murky smog of the city so that its shape is a perfect sphere, not smeared across the horizon like a mirage as it was always seen from the City of Chains.

Unchained. That is how Anders feels at this moment, stepping closer to the water, avoiding the jagged, volcanic rocks. The lapping ocean water sucks the surface out from beneath his feet, leaving a hollow space that he must adjust to by curling his toes down into the cool, wet sand, and he is biting his lip against a smile. He did not have a childhood during which he could frolic on the beach; his experience of a shoreline, that of Lake Calenhad, was as another concentric ring to a prison, wrapped around him in Kinloch Hold.

Stooping, he notices a reddish, pungent plant with stocky, glistening leaves that is clinging to a rock near the waterline. Humming with pleasure, he reaches for it, grasping it low upon its body and tugging it free with a small sucking sound. It is spindleweed, essential in the crafting of restorative potions, lifewards, and other useful spells. He gently shakes the water from the leaves, dabbing the plant dry on his robes, before tucking it into one of several leather satchels at his waist. The plant goes in with a tangle of other species: dried elfroot picked in Sundermount the week before, embrium with its vivid red orange flowers now faded. He thinks as he tucks it in what other things his packs hold. Useful items, of course, such as lyrium potions, salves, bandages, needle and thread: all the apparati of a healer. But there are other things, a haphazard collection of arbitrary effects that some might consider impedimenta, junk, but to him they are tiny treasures because they are his. And the Circle cannot take them away.

Just today, he has added a shell to this collection, and he smiles at the memory of Merrill as she bounded down the beach, pale face already burnished pink with sunshine. She’d presented the shell to him, cooing at how perfect it was, unchipped, with a glistening underbelly of palest rose. He had wrapped it in a piece of a linen bandage and tucked it amongst the other things he had collected, many of which were gifts from grateful patients who could not afford to pay for his services, or from his friends. There is a tiny carving of a mabari, whittled from driftwood found on this very coast, that Hawke had given him. And so nonchalantly had he done it, completing it by the fire one evening in camp, and simply tossing it into his fellow mage’s lap without a word. There is an arrowhead bestowed by Varric that he said was very old, and indeed, it looked that way - crudely fashioned with every strike visible as a smooth indenture, but it was onyx, and beautiful. There are beads, wooden and glass, a tiny doll made of stuffed burlap with orange string hair that a little freckled girl insisted he have despite his gentle protests after he had healed her brother’s broken leg.

He steps away from the water’s edge, boots in one hand, and regards the party straggling along the shore around him. He can feel, rather than see, the glowering presence of Fenris occupying the space behind him, his own bare feet silent on the sand. Hawke and Isabela walk side by side at the forefront, perhaps twenty paces ahead, and Anders can see their heads tilted toward one another, conversing. Isabela points down the because, where it curves around a tangle of wind-barren, gray-washed trees and rocks eroded and pitted by the sea. Merrill has ranged out to the side, within arm’s distance of Isabela, and she is not watching where she steps while looking at something in her hands. Varric is between Anders and the others, dragging his feet in the sand, for of them all, Varric is not a fan of the coast, saying even the susurrus of the ocean makes him seasick.

It is a peaceful day, all his surroundings blending together with a hint of innate harmony. Gulls call in the currents above them, waves splash against the rocks and lap at the beach in a sort of synchronicity with the wind which gusts in troughs and peaks across the sea. It brings in the scent of fresh salt water and clean air to mix with the fragrance of the shore:  the loamy, fresh aroma of seagrass, the cloying perfume of pine.

Anders refuses to turn, to see the city looming in the distance behind them, but there is no need. Even removed as he is at this moment, he cannot help but feel the skeleton bulk of the Gallows where mages wither in oppression, never to know the way the sand feels between their toes, or to see the sun glinting on the feathers of spiraling white birds as they dive for fish in the sea.

He sighs, realizing that he talks himself out of every good mood. Sometimes he wonders if it’s Justice that triggers the thoughts that drown any hint of serenity that steals over him, however rare. Gentle insinuations to serve as reminders so that he does not deviate toward complacency. No chance of that, he thinks bitterly, and suddenly Fenris is beside him, rather than behind.

“You’re like a small child enjoying its first picnic, mage,” the elf grumbles.

Anders shoots him a look darkened by his immediate thoughts. “What would you know about enjoying picnics?” he snaps carelessly, meaning that the broody elf hardly seemed to enjoy anything, but realizing as Fenris’ pale eyebrows snapped down over luminous green eyes that he should have recalled that Fenris and he had much more in common than the elven warrior would admit. As a former slave, there were many joys in life that Fenris had been denied.

“I didn’t mean…” Anders fumbles, but Fenris interrupts him with a negating grunt, and he points ahead with a mailed finger.

“Quit fucking daydreaming and get a move on it,” he snarls. “If I have to guard your pretty little ass I’d prefer not to be a mile from Hawke.”

Anders is still standing motionless, boots in one hand, and he makes a show of twisting about to observe his own backside.

“You think I have a nice ass?” he muses in a curious drawl, unable to resist flashing the recalcitrant elf a half-lidded leer.

Rather than comment, Fenris blows a lungful of air past his lips and his scowl deepens, bright eyes rolling skyward. Then a hand connects between Anders’ shoulder blades, jamming his staff into his back, and propels him forward so forcefully that the mage stumbles twice before he gets his balance.

He is laughing softly to himself as he resumes walking, feeling Fenris’ eyes boring into him from behind like small suns. 

-ooo-

A deep bark punctuates the blanket of tranquil silence that follows this exchange, bellowing deep from the belly of the hulking Mabari darting in and out of the surf. Yet the sound does not bear the edge of bellicosity oft issued past a set of razor sharp teeth, a snarl unfurled with it as the war hound locks with rigidity at the onset of danger time and time again. It is instead a merry howl, gurgling out her throat in a stream of elation as she zips past thighs with sand-caked paws.

Rue bounds up to her human, snuffling her sandy nose into his palm and taking his fingers with a playful gnaw.

“You’re not a pup anymore,” Hawke laughs and casts his gaze downward, “I need this hand lest you choose to munch it off.”

She rumbles with pleased laughter and laps at his wrist, peering up at him before bursting away and flopping into the surf with an explosion. Both Hawke and Isabela fall prey to the resulting gush of warm seawater, prompting them to descend into a fit of harmonizing mirth. It ripples along their shoulders, spilling out throats as they bask in the heat of a Free Marcher summer. Indeed, sunshine has tempered the callused edges of their souls, coaxing out an air of blithe conduct that the wrath of wintertime quashes.

_Good for the soul,_ his father once told him, _as if your skin aches to feel alive._

Undoubtedly, for the radiance of the sun has coaxed out his olive complexion, gracing Hawke with bronzed shoulders and the healthy glow of vivacity long entrenched in memories of Ferelden dirt and companionship.

As their laughter subsides, he observes as Isabela combs slender fingers through her thick raven mane, bunching her locks to lift and reveal the curve of her throat. Her ear is woven with gold, weighed down at the behest of opulence yet adorned with elegance, underscoring the deep tones of her Rivaini complexion. As his gaze trickles down, drinking in the slender arch of her neck, bronze and glistening with specks of the sea, he smiles to himself.

_You’re gorgeous,_ he’d once cooed in her ear, tongue thick with wine and passion, prompting her to giggle accordingly as he melded his weight upon hers in a biweekly dance of carnal need. Yet while the flame of lust had extinguished into platonic camaraderie almost as quickly as it had ignited, he’d sorely meant it.

“Mmm,” she hums now, eyes slipping shut as a single droplet of water glides down her throat.

He watches it pool at the ridge of her collarbone, prompting him to wet his bottom lip and smother a sudden urge to repeat his claim with utter conviction. Instead, he slinks an arm around her shoulders and a smile flowers across her lips as they continue walking along the surf. She glances up at him briefly, though he tracks as her eyes flit over to the woman flanking her other side. Her gaze lingers for a moment and Hawke can sense the longing bleeding from her frame, at which he echoes by assessing the petite elf for himself.

Also graced with raven locks, though mirroring Hawke’s length as they curl just below her lovely ears, she is transfixed on the object cupped in her palms. The corners of her pink lips quirk with mirth, and she is unaware that she is the subject of twofold appraisal as thick lashes bat freely. A mild sunburn sears her cheeks, flushed with the intensity of meeting raw sunlight for a prolonged period. Yet her pallid complexion is now hued with splashes color, the delicate markings of her vallaslin brightening in conjunction, and smatterings of freckles have revealed themselves in moments of drunken stupor and hygienic necessity upon banks of rivers.

He’d too met her lips once, though only for a lick of a moment as they’d giggled beneath the shroud of inebriation.

_You’re adorable_ , he’d mumbled against her plush mouth outside the Hanged Man one balmy night. Yet despite these past couples of months of spiraling from the pillar of stability known as sobriety, he’d absolutely meant it.

Yet he glances back at Isabela, who continues to peer forlornly at Merrill, and offers a consolatory squeeze of the shoulder before his hand slips away. He instinctively turns his head toward the salted breeze billowing in from the sea and blinks twice, grounding himself.

A small galley, six oars pulled in, is anchored offshore and a skiff has been dragged up to the shore, its stern bobbing gently in the wash. At first, everything appears as expected: several men, still too far away to see with clear detail, are removing crates from the skiff, stacking them on a sled which is hitched to a bored, tawny draught horse. It is this sled which Hawke’s group is intended to escort back to Kirkwall.

He casts another glance over his shoulder to account for his ragtag band of misfits, greeting Varric with a smirk before his gaze lingers on the brooding elf about fifteen paces behind them. His features are twisted into a permanent scowl, brow knitted and furrowed over a pair of sharp emerald eyes. He is cross with the group’s healer no doubt, and Hawke finds himself huffing with a small laugh at the cantankerous vision before him. Yet he considers now that his complexion too has deepened, juxtaposed strikingly with his mop of ivory hair and the trails of lyrium infused into his skin. Not dissimilar to a vallaslin, they react to the sun accordingly, crawling down his chin to places unseen with a dim glow.

_You’re cute,_ he’d once slurred unthinkingly before smothering another one of the elf’s diatribes with his mouth. Yet despite the particular brand of contempt with which he ascribes to magical criticism, he’d certainly meant it.

Isabela suddenly touches his arm, ripping him from this pleasant, if hazy memory. She nods her head once toward the sea before them.

“Look at the way the people onboard that galley are standing,” she says in a low voice. “No sea legs. And why are there are only two of them? Even with the crew on the shore, that’s not enough to man that size ship.”

Hawke does not know overmuch about ships, except that he prefers not to be on them, and that the last such time was wedged into a cargo hold with his family, escaping Ferelden, debilitatingly sick with the sea and with grief for the loss of his brother. What he does know is how to take the measure of a man, and as he slows his step to match Isabela’s suddenly cautious pace, he tracks the two men on the galley. One stands with his hand gripping the rail with white knuckles, and the other is leaning against it with a hip. Both shift awkwardly whenever a swell draws beneath the vessel. Both are wearing blue sashes, as are the six men on the shore.

He has seen these colors before, in Kirkwall. The men move as a trained unit, people that have fought together before, and they are well appointed, with solid leather gear that appears to have been made to fit, rather than pieced together off corpses.

“You don’t think they’re just… being helpful, loading that up for us, do you?” Merrill mutters from Isabela’s right, her tone tinged with vague hope.

Isabela glances at her, and Hawke makes a low noise in the back of his throat. At that moment, one of the men on the ship notices them, yelling _“oy”_ to the group on the shore, and as one, they stop and look, all in various postures. One of them straightens fully as another shoves a crate further onto the sledge with the toe of his boot, and then these two are approaching their group while the remaining ones gather in an easy knot, waiting with grim expressions.

“Ho there,” the taller of the two calls when he is ten paces out from them. He is a rough fellow, sash stretched tight over a bulging belly, grizzled beard as untamed as the kinked red hair that protrudes from his skull cap. He spares but a flick of the eyes for the Mabari, even though she appears as though she might exceed half his weight. He is taking their measure, eyes grazing the staff on Hawke’s back and the daggers strapped to Isabela’s shoulders. Fenris and Anders are behind, still, but it would be hard to miss the fact that three of the group carry staves which are obviously not walking sticks.

Further, the Mabari war hound that had been relegated to a lolling pup all afternoon suddenly snaps to attention and sprints to the forefront of the group. A flare of canine instinct ripples through her broad frame, locking her shoulders as she bares her teeth. She does not yet emit he growl embedded in her throat, though Hawke’s gaze flicks between her and the pair of men.

“Well ain’t this my lucky day,” the man growls, his yellowed teeth appearing in an unfriendly smile behind a rusty bristle of beard. “Three rogue apostates in the middle of nowhere. Templars pay out in favor and coin both for such deliveries.”

Hawke’s square jaw viscerally tightens, nostrils flaring, and he stalks forward to reach his hound’s side. From behind, they are visions of a Ferelden ideal: fiercely loyal, heels digging into the earth to protect their own. From the forefront they exude silent rage, eyes filled with warning and lips unfurled into snarls.

He places a hand on Rue’s neck, eyes failing to slip from their newfound company, and purposefully thumbs her spiked collar. Jagged with rusted metal, oft used to tear the life from men as he had instilled in her to do, he now tugs on it surreptitiously. She tenses further, choosing to growl deeply as he lifts his chin.

“Is it desperation that drives a man to idiocy, or are we just scraping the bottom of the barrel now?” he scoffs and his mana begins to brew inside of him.

“It’s insults now, is it?” He is still grinning, seemingly unphased by the threatening posture of the mage and the mabari.

His compatriots have taken a silent cue, or have simply taken the measure of the situation perhaps, for the remaining four that are on the beach move to join the first two.

“How about you turn around, and head back the way you came from, eh? Maybe I’ll forget your faces next time I see the flaming sword.”

“No, an insult would be grasping. I speak plainly,” Hawke growls, sounding eerily similar to that of his war hound. His palms crackle with unseen ire, the product of his impatient wrath for templars building in his fingertips. “And you are mistaken. Ours shall be the last you remember before the Maker is forced to pick through what remains of your pathetic soul.”

-ooo-

Anders has been in enough fights in his time to recognize the subtle indicators that one is imminent. Hawke does not realize, probably, that he exudes an aura of menace in his posture, an electric storm waiting to crash upon the shore of negotiations. Even now, he is standing with his staff, dark wood well-polished from use, out to his left side, a foot long blade elevated in front of the calf wrapped in the buckles of a leather greave that had once been brown, but was now closer to black. More than some of that stain was blood, Anders knew.

It is at this moment that it occurs to him that he still does not have any boots on.

He thinks briefly about simply sitting down in the sand and tugging them on, perhaps distracting the lot of them with a most unexpected behavior, but then there is no time, and instead he is dropping his boots on the ground and tugging his own staff loose from its strap at his back. While he does not need it to cast, it’s saved him more than once from close encounters. Beside him, he senses Fenris similarly freeing his massive two handed blade as the situation before them goes abruptly south.

The evident leader of the band of mercenaries (for Anders has surmised that they’ve stumbled upon a heist, rather than a smuggling operation), grimaces fouly at Hawke’s words, and tilts his head toward the galley. An arrow springs into existence at Hawke’s feet, mere inches from him, and he is likely saved from being impaled through the leg by the whim of the currents, unbalancing the archer on the unstable deck.

“Fucking voidspawn,” Fenris snarls beside him, echoing Anders’ general thoughts. The elf is then moving to Hawke’s side, leaving the healer where he is safest: behind everyone else.

Anders draws on his mana to hurl ice at the archer, when something dark whizzes past, alarmingly close to his head, and a spurt of arterial blood erupts from the man’s throat where Varric’s crossbow bolt has struck him. The dwarf is unburdened by impediment to his aim, and before the second man aboard the galley can act, whether to draw a weapon or duck, Bianca cracks again and another bolt slams into a chest this time, toppling the mercenary over the hull and into the water. The first man is clinging to the guard rail with one hand, and clutching his throat with the other, blood gushing through his fingers.

This has happened in a matter of seconds: distracting seconds which have managed to draw the attention of everyone on the beach.

And then everyone is bristling with weapons.

Isabela’s daggers appear in her hands in a fluid motion, and she drops into a half crouch in front of Merrill. A cascade of swords, daggers, and a lethal, spiked mace ripples through the mercenary band, and the bearded leader lunges at Hawke.

It is this man who wields the mace, and it arcs impossibly fast, connecting with Hawke’s side the instant  the man who has fallen from the galley hits the water, as the mage’s eyes are just beginning to track back from the ship. Rue hurtles off the sand in the same moment, slavering canines bared, locking viciously onto the outstretched arm of Hawke’s assailant. This spontaneous dance of violence almost seems orchestrated in its synchronicity, and Hawke bellows in agony from the blow just as the mercenary leader issues a piercing shriek.

Rue is half the man’s size, even though he is not a small figure, and she is all muscle. The impact as she seizes his arm carries him to the ground as he loses the mace, and then she is on top of him, teeth at his throat. Hawke is doubled over in pain for a moment, his right arm over his chest, sending a thrill of worry through Anders, who instinctively moves toward him.

“Stay back, Blondie,” Varric growls. The dwarf is crab-walking sideways, away from Anders, crossbow up, looking for an angle to aim through his friends.

Anders almost tells him to sod off, but Hawke chooses that moment to straighten, and his staff snaps out, the blade angling up in a wide, practiced swing that carries it across the cheek of the man who had been standing behind Rue’s victim. The mercenary’s head jerks sideways with a howl, and a line of blood appears from his jaw to the corner of his eye, instantly sheeting one side of his face with blood. Before he can even turn back to the face Hawke, Isabela takes a single step forward, grasping the man by his chest armor and tugging him toward her, straight onto her dagger. It plunges through the leather encasing his frame as though it were not even present, and Anders suddenly recalls the ubiquitous vision of the self-proclaimed pirate with her feet up at the table in the Hanged Man, endlessly sharpening those blades with a whetstone.

Isabela holds the dagger in place, supporting his weight, until the man goes limp, then she jerks it out and he collapses half on top of the former leader of the band. Rue is still planted on his chest, her muzzle now dark red, open maw dripping blood and viscera where she has torn out his throat. It is the first time Anders has seen the beast transform from playful pup to war dog, and he makes a mental note not to reveal to her that he is a cat person.

Anders immediately witnesses another transformation, seeing the spritely, diminutive Merrill suddenly lose her pallor to a wash of red haze, and he realizes he is seeing her calling on blood magic, for her medium is now all about her. His sight is augmented by his attunement to the Fade, and it is unlikely that anyone not a mage would see her this way. Immediately, another man falls, screaming and clawing at his skin, writhing in the sand as though being consumed by thousands upon thousands of fire ants.

It is over quickly after that.

In a panic, one of the three remaining men launches himself at Hawke. Their fearless leader is prepared this time, however, and he catches the man with a hand over his throat, and lightning bursts from his fingers. Muscles spasm, and Hawke catches a flailing fist to the face, but he keeps his grip as blackened tendrils crawl from beneath his palm, burning along the mercenary’s face until he drops to the ground, twitching. Fenris takes his head off with one sweep, and then the elf pivots away from the corpse, toward the closest foe, and the lyrium tattoos along his body burst into blue-white light as he plunges a fist through the man’s chest. Armor melts and peels away, and the man drops like a stone, Fenris’ hand dripping red. This display is enough to send the final mercenary running, but he has not gone three steps before Isabela’s dagger sprouts from his back, and he hurtles face first to the ground in a fountain of sand.

* * *

 "Do you always have to pick a fight?" Anders grumbles softly, his hands beginning to rove over Hawke's body, looking for the wounds. Fingers brush the inside of his arm, shifting it up, so that he can prod gently along Hawke’s side. Hawke is sitting at the edge of a blood-soaked patch of sand, his staff at his feet, Rue coiled protectively at his back, supporting his weight, and Anders is kneeling before him. It is not out of character for him to be the only one among them to take any damage in a fight, for he is invariably in front and invariably makes himself a target. Over the last six months, Anders has come to know the man’s form quite well, for he has oft put it back to rights.

“Not… always,” he begins with a grin that concludes in a hiss, wincing harshly when the healer’s hands graze a rib.

The healer pauses when Hawke recoils, laying his palm gently along his side where the buckles of his leather chest plate are cinched. He doesn't respond to Hawke's words immediately, and his eyes are suddenly distant, as though seeking something, some thought, and then they lid halfway as a balmy wave of energy envelops Hawke's side. The pain eases with each pulse of his heart. It finally subsides completely, and his fellow mage's stare returns to his face with a frown.

"Your nose is broken."

“Oh,” he huffs, flinching as adrenaline begins to subside and pain flourishes in lieu of survival instinct. “Does that mean I’m not wildly irresistible anymore?”

Anders' mouth twitches, brows drawing down in what seems to be an affectation of sternness. His slender fingers move to cradle the sides of Hawke's nose as he assesses the damage.

"It's a shame to be so careless with something so exquisite." He says it in a detached way, as though schooling a child for playing too roughly with a toy.

“Dually implying that I’m a work of art and a piece of work? I think I’ll keep you around,” he chuckles, bright eyes creasing as he peers openly at the healer.

The crease of a smile in his eyes quickly becomes a squint of pain as, without notice, Anders deftly jerks the hands on either side of Hawke's nose, realigning the bone with an agonizing crack. The pain is brief however, and then the healer's hands are on either side of his face, tangled in the hair of his beard, angling Hawke's head up and toward him fully. He is peering down at this perspective, still frowning, but says finally:

"No permanent disfiguration. The women of Kirkwall owe me." His eyes flicker up to Hawke's with a glint of jocosity.

“Fuck,” Hawke groans belatedly, eyes fluttering. “Good to know though. And some of the men as well,” he mumbles out huskily, piercing Anders with a heavy stare.

Anders' lips part slightly beneath his intense cerulean gaze, and then one corner of his mouth turns up coyly. He makes no comment, but continues to hold Hawke's face still with one hand while the other presses fingertips softly to the arch of his nose. His magic tingles along the bridge, mending the split skin, tickling.

Hawke’s eyes slip shut and air whistles erratically out of his compromised nose. He issues a small noise suspended between whimper and sigh, indulging in the cool licks of restoration magic that mend cracked bone and sinew. Sensing the Veil thinning around them, he considers, as he always does beneath the touch of a spirit healer, the complexity of the spell. It soothes away raw burn, osculating with the paired benevolence of mortal compassion and supernatural power. Eventually, as any and all shreds of pain dispel beneath the weight of the healer’s magic, he sluggishly opens his eyes to find him with a drawn brow.

It is creased in concentration, fixed over deep amber eyes that bore dutifully into the object of his focus. Though Hawke’s gaze flicks across his features, drinking in his own impeccable nose and the forty-five degree angle of its slope, trailing down to rest over a thin pair of lips. His stubble is a tad longer today, the product of neglect it would seem, peppering his sharp jawline that enjoys the subtle brush of rusty blonde locks. A pinkish hue of sunburn splays across his cheeks, though sunshine has coaxed out the river of freckles spilling from ear to collarbone. Shrouded, however, by the thick weight of feathered pauldrons that the mage insists on wearing in this stifling heat.

_You’re bewitching,_ he suddenly aches to declare, though clamps down on his lips for a reason unknown to him. He cannot discern why, for he explicitly, unrepentantly means it.

The healing aura fades, and the look of concentration with it, replaced with a look Anders most likely means to be dour and serious, but is transformed into something more akin to long-suffering fondness by the tug of a smile. He sighs through his nose, studying Hawke’s face as though deciding if it has appropriately resumed its character.

“Anything else hurt?” he questions.

“Not that I can discern,” he sighs, unbidden. “Thank you.”

Anders nods, and then shifts from a crouch to sit in the sand across from Hawke. He glances about, eyes passing over the corpses littering the beach. Already, birds are alighting on the bodies, and the smell is terrible, masking the bouquet of pine and sea air. Varric and Merrill are finishing loading the last of the crates onto the sled, to be towed back to Kirkwall and delivered for a payment. Hawke has declared the money will finally succeed in allowing him to buy in to the mission to the Deep Roads he has planned for more than a year. Isabela is a more distant figure, having rowed herself out to the galley to inspect it.

“Everything always seems to end in bloodshed with you lot,” Anders comments, though without much inflection in his tone. “And to think it was starting to be a good day.”

Hawke is about to comment, when out of nowhere, a pair of boots thumps into the sand beside Anders’ bare feet. Fenris is then looming over them both, propping his hands on his hips as he stares down his sharp nose at Anders. He flashes him a smile full of perfect white teeth.

"Death, destruction, gold, and wine at the bar tonight. I call that a damn good day, mage."

 

 


End file.
